Posted in: Apple, TV | Tagged: Lucky

Lucky Editor on Apple TV Series, Showrunners, Anya Taylor-Joy & More

Editor Tyler L. Cook spoke with us about Apple TV's crime drama, Lucky, working with showrunners Tropper & Pappas, Anya Taylor-Joy, and more.

For editor Tyler L. Cook (Sword of Trust, GLOW), it was an opportunity of a lifetime to work with creator Jonathan Tropper (Your Friends & Neighbors, Warrior), co-showrunner Cassie Pappas (Silo, Griselda), and star Anya Taylor-Joy on the Apple TV crime drama Lucky. The series follows the title character (Taylor-Joy), a con artist who goes on the run after a multimillion-dollar heist goes sideways. Pursued by both the FBI and a ruthless crime boss, Priscilla Masterson (Annette Bening), Lucky must fight for her life – and a way out. Cook spoke to Bleeding Cool about whether he was familiar with the Marissa Stapley novel of the same name, which the series is based on, having creative autonomy and flexibility as part of a team of editors, and the pressures of filming at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

Lucky Editor Tyler L. Cook on Navigating Through High-Tempo Jonathan Tropper Crime Drama

Bleeding Cool: What intrigued you about 'Lucky?' Were you familiar with Marissa Stapley's novel? How'd you get involved?

Cook: No, I wasn't aware of the novel before I found out about the project. I had worked with Hello Sunshine on two other shows before this: 'Daisy Jones and the Six' and 'Little Fires Everywhere.' I read a Deadline article about the show getting announced and Anya being involved with Jonathan Tropper and Cassie Pappas as showrunners. I was immediately like, "I want to be involved in this project." It sounded so awesome, and I just love all the people, so I reached out to Lauren Neustadter, the head of Hello Sunshine, whom I've worked with before. I said, "Please consider me for this," and then she was like, "Your name is already on the list. So, hopefully we will be in touch soon." I met with Cassie and Jonathan van Tulleken, the director of the pilot, and we had a really great meeting and hit it off, and that's how I got brought aboard.

What's it like working with Cassie, Jonathan Tropper, and Jonathan van Tulleken as creatives?

Yeah, they're wonderful. They are incredibly smart, and they know what they want. Within that, they want you to explore, do your best work, take chances, and take big swings, especially working with Jonathan van Tulleken. During the shooting, he would call me every day, and he would walk me through. He's like, "Here's what we got today, here's how I'm feeling about it. Here's sort of how I see it in my head, but like, make it better," so, "Prove me wrong, basically." It was a very collaborative environment, and we found a lot of cool things in post that I think brought the show up even more. It was a lot of fun to have that room to play, experiment, and surprise them. We always had this great source material to come back to and an incredible script. We were like, "How can we keep pushing this further?" That was our guiding principle, but yeah, they were awesome.

How does a show like 'Lucky' differentiate from maybe some of the other work? Was there anything different that you found yourself doing that you don't normally do?

Yeah, the cool thing about this project, the first episode especially, but I think it is an extension to the whole show, is that she is effectively on the run from the beginning, and she doesn't stop. It's a show that keeps going; it moves, and she gets out of one situation and lands herself right into another one. The big challenge for us editorially was like, "How do we do one big chase episode, but not make it feel repetitive?"

Sometimes, there's an ability to tune out when you're dealing with continuous action. As an audience, I think you can check out or get a little tired of it, and it loses the stakes. The big challenge was like, "How do we keep resetting it? How do we keep making it, raising the stakes, and making it important?" I think one of the ways that we found was that everything in the show is filtered from Lucky's perspective. We are put in her shoes, and that never really changes. It was a very rigid, disciplined kind of shooting style and a disciplined editorial style that really leaned into this like first-person point of view that made it unique and special.

Working as part of a team, was there something you guys shared notes on for the show to make sure things were consistent, or did each editor have their own personal touch on how the episode came out?

Yeah, everyone brings their own viewpoint and editorial touchstones to a project. That was the cool thing about working on this show [like 'Lucky'], is that we had a very long time in post-production, maybe a little longer than shows like this normally get. That gave us a really great opportunity to look at each other's work and be like, "Hey, that cool thing you're doing in episode three is awesome. How can we support that throughout the rest of the show? How can I set that up in the pilot? How can we filter that through?"

One example of that is we have a lot of flashes in the show because, as I said, it's a very first-person perspective, so we're seeing what's going on in Lucky's mind, and we'll cut to the night before, maybe a year ago, or something like this. We're like, "How can we do that effectively? How can we do that in an interesting stylistic way?" We had a lot of different attempts at that before we kind of landed where we did, and I feel like that was a really big team effort. That wasn't just one person figuring it out. It was like, it was a lot of experimentation and landing on what is eventually in the show.

Was there a particular sequence in the series that was maybe a little more difficult to execute than others?

Yeah, I don't know about difficult, but one of the things I think was tricky about the pilot in general is that we were shooting in Caesar's Palace, so the first half of the episode takes place in the casino, and it was a live working casino. We only had one bite of the apple, right? So, we were there for about a week, and we had to be really sure that we were getting everything we needed, because there wasn't going back, getting reshoots, and pickups.

I remember one day, Jonathan van Tulleken calling me like, "Hey, we're shooting this moment where Lucky gets spotted. She takes off running, and I don't know if I have all the pieces I need. So, can you please let me know? We have one more chance this afternoon to grab. You know, anything else that we could possibly use, so cut it as quickly as you can and get back to me." Sure enough, I was like, "Hey, I think you got it, but there's one shot we could really use if you got time." He's like, "We'll make it happen," and they did. The challenge of doing a show like this in Caesar's Palace is you have to make sure that you've got all the pieces, and so I think that was like a fun challenge to have to get on a sequence before you're even done shooting to make that. It's doing what it needs to do.

Lucky, which also stars Clifton Collins Jr, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and Timothy Olyphant, streams Wednesdays on Apple TV.

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